Wow 3 years of trying! Hopefully you get in soon.
They’ve talked about why it’s so hard to get in, many times in the past. This was their explanation back in Nov 2021 back when the number of applicants was even smaller than it is now:
Well, I can actually confirm WHY it is you haven’t been selected.
The real answer is that we have 18.2k people wanting to work with us. Each test gets about 7k applications on average. I suspect that the standard company doesn’t have 7k prototypes to ship out for beta (though I WOULD be excited if that were possible for us). Then you need to factor in that we need balance in the testers we select. As an example, California has a LOT of people in Centercode that apply for tests. But we can’t fill up our tests exclusively with people from California… And we need a spread of ages… And we need to get a spread of genders… And…
So we’ve been filtering out people that have already worked with us. But there’s still a LOT of folks that are interested in joining! When we tried to send out callouts to only a portion of folks, we got people angry that they weren’t notified and they caught it by accident. We had people feeling like they had to check Centercode every day just in case we added a new opportunity (which is SUPER not fair). And we had trouble with getting the right balance of testers (“Why didn’t we have more than 2 women apply? … Oh.”).
We have ratios and qualifications set for every test. A recent callout asks about an existing product in someone’s home. We’ll be selecting a ratio of testers for each of the responses to make sure the product has compatibility AND that we’re not letting issues slip between the cracks on that front.
And all of this comes together for…
Smaller odds of being selected for a limited number of products.
I know it’s frustrating. We hear you. It is a weird blessing and curse to have so very many people excited about beta testing with us (kinda like when we run out of stock for a product people are stoked about).
But we are excited to work with you in the future and the enthusiasm from our end is real. We wish we could add everyone into the projects they want without having to worry about product supply, bandwidth for managing testers (it takes resources on our end when we add more folks into a test because we want to reply to people’s feedback), cost of shipping, etc.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to address this. I hope this helped shine some light on things from our end.
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